Ted Cruz and Donald Trump’s Familiar Feud Over New York

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called out Donald Trump this week for the high crime of “embodying New York values,” which, translated into Republican primary-ese, apparently means that Mr. Trump has cooties.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what he meant, Mr. Cruz said during Thursday night’s debate. “Most people know exactly what New York values are,” he said.

Whatever Mr. Cruz intended by invoking “New York values,” it was not nice. The toxic coating on his hollow remark incensed Peter T. King, the Republican congressman from Long Island, who cannot stand Mr. Cruz to begin with. The congressman gave the senator’s words some thought, then had a piece of advice for him.

“Go back under a rock,” Mr. King said.

During the debate, Mr. Cruz offered his tidy summary of how 8.4 million people view the world: “Everyone understands that values in New York City are socially liberal, or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage, focused around money and the media.”

Funny he should mention a focus on money.

Mr. Cruz presents us with the familiar spectacle of a politician denouncing New York while simultaneously collecting bags of money there to pay for campaigns.

He is being backed by Robert Mercer, a computer scientist and hedge fund chieftain. In April, Mr. Mercer threw $11 million into the kitty for the Cruz campaign. Mr. Cruz is widely, openly, deeply disliked by other elected officials in his own party, but the Mercer money worked like the slippers on Cinderella’s gnarly feet.

Now Mr. Cruz is thought to be jostling with Mr. Trump for the same swath of voters, and until the “New York values” crack, the two had been publicly civil when speaking of each other.

Perhaps it goes without saying that Mr. Mercer, the foundational supporter of Mr. Cruz, lives in New York.

Mr. Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, used a loophole to avoid $6 billion in taxes over the last decade, according to a United States Senate investigation. The fund says it complied with all the laws. The Internal Revenue Service has said it is reviewing the matter. By happy chance, Mr. Cruz has called for that agency to be abolished.

But enough about public policy.

Let’s put aside the financial benedictions New York has bestowed on Mr. Cruz’s presidential quest: the $11 million Mercer donation to the Cruz PAC, as well as the December fund-raising gathering at the Madison Avenue offices of the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, or the undisclosed $1 million in loans, including money from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, to Mr. Cruz’s successful 2012 Senate campaign. It bears repeating: Hypocrisy is more widely practiced than any religion or creed.

The subject here, after all, is not hypocrisy but the villainy of embodying New York values.

In 2013, Mr. Mercer was sued in federal court by the servants on the domestic staff of his Long Island home, who said they were docked pay and bonuses if the toiletries fell below one-third full, or when they failed to stock bathrooms with extra towels. The suit was “amicably” settled, a lawyer for the servants told The New York Times.

It is one thing for a politician to take campaign money from people who pore over federal code to get around $6 billion in taxes.

It is quite another to be the creation of someone who may have calculated monetary punishments for people who did not swab the toilets to his specifications.

Representative King has spoken warmly of Mr. Trump and openly encouraged his participation in the Republican primaries. But even Mr. King, who has taken a hard line on Muslims in America, claiming that they were insufficiently diligent in cooperating with the police, has taken exception to Mr. Trump’s call to ban immigration by Muslims.

A couple of years ago, at the screening of a documentary at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, Mr. Trump’s face briefly flickered across the screen. It was as if the bad guy wrestler had just climbed into the ring: The auditorium erupted in jeers, hoots and boos. And back in September, a crowd waiting on Fifth Avenue to see Pope Francis roll by discovered that Mr. Trump was watching from an upper floor of Trump Tower. There were boos aplenty, according to reporters on the scene. Mr. Trump has never run for office in New York City, and with good reason. Mr. Trump’s values are about one person. The city is just a prop, like the campaign and everything else.

It is just another week at the office when some politician uses New York as a straw man for his or her dumb prejudices. Things have reached a far greater level of injury, however, when the likes of Donald Trump are anointed the standard-bearer of our tribe.

Correction:

The About New York column on Friday, about Senator Ted Cruz’s comment that Donald J. Trump embodied New York values, referred incompletely to the source of $1 million in loans to Mr. Cruz’s successful 2012 Senate campaign. The money included loans from both Goldman Sachs and Citibank, not just from Goldman Sachs.